University of New Haven defeated teams from Drexel and Carnegie Mellon, one of the top universities in the world in cyber security and technology education, among others, to advance through the regional competition hosted recently at Penn State University.

As part of the 48-hour competition, the students performed penetration testing for a fictional company — Gotham Elections, the university said in a news release.

They met with people playing the role of company staff and spent the next eight to nine hours attempting to compromise various devices on the company’s network and documenting their findings, it said.

The team then had until 8 a.m. the next morning to prepare a comprehensive report and a presentation.

“Experiences like this are a great opportunity for our students to practice their hacking skills, compete with other teams, and learn about professional penetration testing,” said team advisor Frank Breitinger, assistant professor of computer science and co-director of the University of New Haven’s Cyber Forensics Laboratory.

“These events offer great opportunities to network with potential future employers,” Breitinger said in the release. “Making it to the nationals is a tremendous success for a small university like ours.”

The University of New Haven team this month also placed second out of 23 teams at CyberSEED, a national cyber security conference hosted by the University of Connecticut. The team won $7,500, finishing behind Central Florida, which came in first and won $10,000.